


forget,

by TheRatsAreListening



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Gen, do you feel like crying, in which: azula deserved better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27270055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRatsAreListening/pseuds/TheRatsAreListening
Summary: Azula doesn't fantasize about reconciling with their mother, for a series of reasons, not the least of which that Fire Lady Ursa isn't really /there/ anymore, alive though she may be. Someone /is/ there. It's just not her, no matter how much Azula wishes it was, so her wrath might have somewhere to go. But this Noriko character has plans of her own.
Relationships: Azula and Ursa
Kudos: 38





	forget,

**Author's Note:**

> Some spoilers for the comics, although of course, this deviates. I wrote it as an addition to someone else's post because I was Vibing but people keep blocking me lately so I lose access to my own fucking writing. As such, I want to save it here. It's not particularly good but it was more about the feel than the skill and while I did clean it up slightly, to make it read better outside of the context of the post, I'm not trying to fix it. Mostly, what I wrote is what you get, if I try any harder it's never gonna be good enough.

Zuko keeps visiting after they find her in Hira'a, and Ursa—Noriko—loves him for it even if she doesn’t remember him or herself. It's probably because he doesn't go there expecting to find his mother. He doesn't go there expecting her to one day remember him. He just goes, and brings with him an offering of exactly as much of her past as she thinks she can handle, and not a drop more.

He never offers to take Azula with him, and she never asks.

One year, after Ozai dies in a profoundly unspectacular fashion, the woman who is not their mother, if she ever was, asks Zuko to take her back with him, for just a day. Azula finds out about this via having her just... _show up._

Considering their last encounter, she is personally not a fan of this development, because tears don’t suit her, and the awareness that she was never loved despite being perfect, while Zuko _was_ despite being far from it, also doesn’t suit her. She can’t make sense of it, and it makes her constantly feel like she’s about to be ambushed by something that she can’t defend herself against. She asks if Ursa is here to offer another vacant apology and the contempt in her voice is bitter on her own tongue. 

“Will one more make a difference?” Ursa asks. “Will a hundred?” She sounds like she’s absolutely willing to do it a hundred times just for the chance that the one-hundred-and-first will mean something, and Azula has no clue what to do with that.

“Why do you care? You don’t know me,” she says instead. Noriko doesn't. Ursa didn't either. But Ursa's memories aren't even here.

Maybe that's some sort of mercy.

It's weird to have her name bouncing around in Azula's head like that and have it not be in reference to an incorporeal rendition whose main interest is to lie to her face as serenely and as distressingly as possible. It's not accurate. It doesn't match the face or the voice. It barely matches some of the mannerisms. But _Noriko_ doesn't feel right, either. No name that she could scribble onto a piece of paper and burn to fine ash would soften the dissonance. This is nothing like having a conversation with something that has a name. It's like talking to the way that waking up from a nightmare feels.

“I think I was afraid of what it meant that your father approved of you,” the nightmare says, and it’s clear from her tone and the way her eyes dart around that she has pieced this together from conversations with Zuko. Azula’s stomach turns. “And I think I smothered that fear with indifference. You weren’t in line for the throne, so I must've thought it was only fair to make your brother my priority. I think I made my peace with you being a lost cause. And so I turned you into one.”

Azula can’t look at her, because she’s too busy trying to figure out how to feel about the sheer honesty of this. No empty proclamations of love that never had the capacity to be true in the first place. Just a naked admission of a profound absence. No mind games.

She doesn’t know how to win if she can’t play.

“Isn’t it messed up,” Ursa pushes through the silence, and laughs like she’s trying not to cry, “that the most unselfishly I can possibly love you is when I don’t know you at all? Don’t know myself? I was the greatest obstacle in the path of my own love. But now I’m gone.” She sounds oddly cheerful about it.

 _It's not surprising_ _, people have a hard time loving me once they know me and you're not that different,_ Azula refuses to think. She settles on “So I was right,” eventually. “You hated me for being better than you. You didn’t _want_ my power, which I didn’t understand at the time. But you did fear me.” She feels strangely vindicated. A ghost of broken glass brushes against her hand.

“I think I was afraid both _of_ you and _for_ you. And I made a terrible mess of both.” Azula looks up. It’s still weird. She can’t associate that face with her mother, but in all fairness, the same was true of the old one.

“You know, you should’ve poisoned _him_ instead of Grandfather.”

“Sorry?” It's not an apology, it's a slightly less uncouth version of "Huh?"

“Did Zuzu never figure it out, or did he just not tell you?” Oh, this is fun now. “You helped Father become Fire Lord in exchange for Zuko’s life. You killed Azulon, and then he had you leave because he knew he was next. You never should’ve given him the chance to figure that out.”

Ursa looks at her hands as if she’s trying to imagine them doing that. Taking the life of one man instead of the other, changing the course of history. “If I had been a better mother, perhaps I would have.”

The next string of words tears away from her like a suture out of a wound, and she barely understands them as they bounce off the empty walls. “It’s alright. I know not everyone has what it takes. If you and I had gotten along better, I might have done it for you.”

“You were a _child!_ ” Ursa erupts, and Azula has never heard anything that sounds like this. It’s anger, yes, but it’s not _at_ her. It’s at something that fills the room despite not being present at all. “Children aren’t weapons. I could’ve never done that.”

“So instead, you did something worse.”

“You’re very utilitarian,” Ursa remarks, after a few moments that give the sound time to settle like snow, not even trying to disguise her guilt. “I wish I could say you got that from me. Then again, maybe I’m glad I didn’t give you one of the traits that made it easier for him to get into your head.”

“He didn't,” she argues. It’s an involuntary response, like recoiling from a hot surface.

“It’s alright. He manipulated all of us.”

“All of _you_. _I’m_ better that you!”

“Yes, you are,” Ursa concedes, with a smile. It disarms Azula like an ax would. It's not the sort of loss one has time to register. “You would never give yourself up for anything. Not even a clean slate and a fresh start.”

“Oh, don’t tell me you regret your wonderful marriage and your perfect little _daughter,_ ” she bounces back.

“Perhaps I should,” Ursa shrugs. “I don’t. I’m no longer the person who paid the price of this second life. I'm grateful to her. But I can't feel that loss in full. I wish I could say I do, because it’s not fair for you and your brother to be carrying that weight by yourselves.”

“Oh, yes,” Azula interjects, mockingly. “Zuzu was positively _crushed._ ”

“I know.” There’s no defensiveness there, and all Azula can think is _who is this woman_. “I can’t take that from you. But I can be a place for you to set it down for a moment.”

“Set what down, the looming notion that you ruined our lives?”

“I clearly wasn’t strong enough to have saved you, or I would’ve done that instead!” Ursa sort of... pleads. Azula doesn't know if she wants to afford her the privilege of being seen as weak rather than malevolent, and she doesn't have time to make up her mind. “Not that you needed me—”

“No. But I could have used you anyway.”

The silence stretches on for several Avatar Cycles.

“So do you think I could visit again?”


End file.
